Tag Archive | moving out

As you may know, I was evicted from my apartment in New Jersey last October. Thankfully I had a friend who offered me shelter, two friends actually.

The one shelter, a trailer home that would have been rent-free, needed renovations. As in, it wasn’t livable. There wasn’t even a toilet installed, or a shower head. The place was a mess, in fact some who think the White House is a dump might actually change their mind after seeing that trailer home. The renovations were supposed to be done in a week, or two weeks. After a couple of months, I was told it was move-in day, so I went down with my cat in tow and… found the place to still be a wreck. For wasting my time, as it was an hour-long drive each way, I gave up on that trailer home.

Unfortunately for my other friend, it has meant staying in her house. For the past ten months, that’s where I’ve been is sleeping on her couch, trying to find work and make a comeback of sorts. After getting this current job, I was handed walking papers. I’m not sure what the whole story was, because one minute I was a drain on their finances, and the next I’m being told that some of her friends think i “needed a direction.”

With nothing in savings, and a checking account that I was working on getting out of the red, not to mention the fact that I have a lousy credit score and especially an eviction to deal with, I had to look for a place to live. My budget consists of the moths flying out of my wallet as I open it, and then I need government assistance to get that first month’s rent if I should happen to find someone who is willing to rent to me.

Nothing I found was perfect. I found an apartment in a bad part of town that was slightly better than the trailer home, and the landlord would have rented to me but I decided against that. I found another place at the other end of the street from my favorite karaoke bar, but they wouldn’t rent to me because of the eviction. There was an old house that was subdivided into four apartments, but that was out of my budget and had more space than I knew what to do with, though I’d have rented it for how close it was to a duck pond I like to visit on rare occasions.

One day I got a text out of the blue from a friend I haven’t talked to in a while. I knew he had a house he was renting, and I knew that every time I chatted with him, there was someone else staying there. So I was like, “hey, do you have a room you could rent out?”

He did have a room, which he offered up as a last resort if I needed it. As time passed and nothing was working out, it was quickly becoming my only option.

So the room I would be renting was the smallest room, where the litter box from the last cat was located. The room across the hall would be available to move into in about… two or three months.

On move-in day, or at least the first of two move-in days, I was told the other room would be available in about… a week. So I slept in the cat box room last night, after showering off all the sweat that covered my body after going up and down stairs and back and forth from car to house. I didn’t get everything moved out as quickly as I thought I could, which is why I ended up with a second move-in day.

Today I went to work, and discovered it’s less than 5 minutes to drive to work now! And then I ended up late to work, because I had to run back into the house to get my house key that wasn’t given to me the night before so I could lock the door. And then after parking the car, I dumped my work bag as I was getting out of the car. This delayed me enough that I had to stand and wait for the freight train to pass through so I could cross, but of course it had to stop and leave me no way to walk around. After it moved aside, I continued in to work, which I was then late for the start of my shift. I have an awesome job, let me tell you, because they have the ability to move your shift a few minutes, so my 9:15 shift became a 9:30 shift. If I carve out a few extra minutes in the morning, I could walk to work instead and not have to deal with the train at all, which is yet another perk about living here now.

Once I got home from work, I was told, “hey guess what? The room across the hallway is available for you to move into!”

“No way!”

“Yes way!”

Okay, the conversation wasn’t quite like that, but it was close enough. So I’ve moved a few things across the hall already. The other room, I treated like sleeping in a storage room, as I had things just piled up so they were there but not taking up too much space.

After moving some things across the hall into the bigger room, I’ve made it feel a little homely. My computer is on a television stand right now instead of being on the floor, and I have things set on top of the television stand instead of being in reusable grocery tote bags or my suitcases. I mean, I might still be living out of my suitcases for a bit until I get some hangers for the closet (my hangers are in storage).

However, it feels a little more like I live somewhere. I have my own room, I can have privacy if I want. I can take a nap midday and not worry about being bothered by small children. I can leave my clothes on the floor… I can pick up after my lazy self. I can go to bed when I want, and I don’t have to worry about anyone playing on the computer until they feel tired (I often wanted to ask her if she could go to bed no later than midnight some nights, and other nights I could barely stay up that long and tried to pass out).

There is a downside to this, and no it’s not that I now have to pay rent. Believe me, for the perks, it’s worth it to pay rent. But my friend’s youngest son, the one who never stole my portable video game devices but who was often the louder and noisier one, cried and had fits when he realized that I was moving out. My friend, his mom, said it took about an hour to calm him down last night. Tonight when I stopped in, he was only a bit happy to see me but still quite sad that I had to go. He doesn’t understand that I was bothering his mom, and she was bothering me, even if we usually seemed to get along. I mean, there were times when I wanted to stand up for myself, or maybe just tell her how I felt about her at times, but I didn’t because I knew it would mean I had to leave and I was often in no position to go elsewhere. I’ve thought about ending my friendship with her so many times, I thought about writing a “now that I’m out of here and you can’t do anything” post, but… today I happened to think that I’m not that angry right now, and it might not even do any good in the long run. So my stay has caused quite a bit of hurt feelings all around.

But let’s think about this.

I have more space now.

I have space of my very own.

And I have a lot of stuff in storage that I need to clear out of there.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned lately, it’s that I have a lot of stuff, and I’m getting tired of moving it from place to place. So my mission is going to be to figure out a way to make the storage unit disappear from my bills, and then get everything I own down to something more manageable. Bonus points if I manage to do it before the worst of the winter weather, at least for the part about clearing things out of storage.

It was a quarter to 10 on Thursday morning. I knew my parking meter allotment was just running out as I checked the time.

If I left to feed the meter, I might have been called forth. If I stayed, it’s possible that a meter maid might not have been checking my car by the time I was done. I did get the parking ticket, as luck would have it, but I don’t think it could have been helped.

All the while, I was losing time at work. I sat there hoping I wasn’t going to lose my job as a result of this absence, despite letting the instructor know the day before that I had things I needed to take care of.

All I could think was, I shouldn’t even be here.

I was sitting in the county’s government building, waiting for a response to the application I had submitted for temporary public assistance. It was your standard bureaucratic waiting room: uncomfortable plastic and metal chairs, posters with phone numbers to call for other services offered by the same or similar departments, tile flooring, fluorescent lighting, and miserable people.

I was playing on my iPhone 6S that I bought when I had more money. I was wearing a shirt and jeans from Lane Bryant, clothes that are never inexpensive even when they’re on sale. I wore my $300 ankle-high boots from the renaissance faire because they make me feel like a rock star, plus they looked better for wearing to work than my sneakers would have been.

For a little while, a guy was sitting in front of me who was wearing a Taco Bell uniform t-shirt. In another section of chairs, I saw a guy get up when called, and he looked like your traditional bearded Harley-Davidson-riding kind of dude. I saw a woman wearing pants that were open on the side but held together by a ribbon of fabric that zigzagged down the length of her leg, and all I could think was that those pants would be better off in a night club than any kind of bureaucratic office. I wondered what reasons the other people had for being there, but I was certain that their needs were greater than mine.

I knew I would have to speak to a case worker or someone, and while it’s been scheduled for next week, the fact remains that it’s a part of the process. So what do I say? Three years ago, I had about $100,000 to my name. After paying off a couple of loans, I had a little less than that. I basically went through about $40,000 a year, for two years, and barely worked during that time. I haven’t yet landed a job that will pay that much. So, at what point do I say that I’m apparently bad with money and shouldn’t be given hand-outs?

But that’s just the thing. Now, I need the hand-outs to get back on track.

I needed the $100,000, which was an inheritance. No, I didn’t need it in the sense that I had $100,000 worth of debt or any other such needs. I needed it as a test of myself and others. If given that much money, would I choose fun over responsibility? Having that much, would I have friends because I’m a nice person who buys things they ask for, or would I have friends because I’m a nice person who they respect and care about?

After losing the money, I lost the fiancé. While it became obvious that we were two different people, the fact remains that he ended our relationship after our eviction from the apartment was definite. However, I had just started a job that hadn’t started paying; if he had any faith or patience, he could have stayed “for richer or poorer.” I think about those words, “for richer or poorer,” in regards to the end of our relationship, and it reminds me that he left before he had to make that vow in front of God and our families. If he had stayed, I could have received homelessness prevention services easier since his name was on the lease for the apartment as well. It’s quite possible that I could have turned myself around months ago.

Of course, I wouldn’t have burned through so much money if the ex fiancé wasn’t so willing to spend it on me. He kept talking to his friends, and he was the one saying that I could buy a condo, or that I’d be fine living in a luxury apartment where the rent was $2200 a month. Well, it was a roof over my head that allowed me to have a cat, but I had never priced apartments before and I just assumed that the higher price was because it was New Jersey and so close to NYC.

I probably should have ended our relationship sooner, but I didn’t see any problems at that time. It was only 6 months into our relationship at that time as well, so I wasn’t thinking logically and nothing was sending up red flags. If anything, it was nice to not be alone after losing my Mom, and I think that mattered more to me than making sure I wasn’t getting screwed out of money.

But living with a friend I’ve known for over 10 years, I thought things were going to be different. I’ve done things for her, like teaching her how to drive, and I’ve bought things she needed when she asked for them. Looking back, I bought things that some of her other friends would have paid for just the same, and she didn’t really need them to survive but I did want her to be happy just the same. Within the past month, I’ve been “reminded” that she didn’t have to let me stay here, something that was told to me by some of her friends who she has no problem complaining to when I’ve done something she hasn’t liked, but she never seems to defend me or express gratitude towards me while I’m here. And I feel like everything I did for her was just to make her happy, so now I regret doing it at all. I feel used, as if I did nothing for her throughout the years, and I just feel like I’ve been taken in so there’s one more person to serve her and take her verbal abuse.

If I think about it all, I do need the government assistance right now. I need to get out of this house and live alone again. I need to pick up overtime shifts, not so I can keep an apartment and have food, but to pay off the debts I’ve racked up. And if I don’t live here, I can work overtime and not worry about missing dinner, or even feeling like I’m taking food out of other people’s mouths. So while it hurts a tiny bit to read the words “Notice To Vacate” on the letter that my friend gave me, it also is the kick I need to leave here and live a bit more comfortably.

Comfort is relative. I’ll be sleeping on the floor, getting government assistance. It’s not the life I want. It’s not a life I deserve, though I can’t decide if I deserve to have things be worse or if I deserve a bit more luxury. There are other people who are more deserving, harder-working, who had a rougher life growing up, who have to struggle more because of prejudices against their race or sexuality, people who have more mouths to feed and can’t make a more substantial income. I have been blessed and rather fortunate in life, which makes me wonder if it’s caused me to delude myself into believing I’m more capable of bouncing back without assistance than I really am capable of doing.

Perhaps appearances really are deceiving. Anyone in that room could have had less of a need than I do for housing assistance or food stamps, or any of the programs I didn’t sign up for. They might have other family members pushing money towards them to help out, just to make things easier for them. Me? I know people who can’t help me out because they have so much going on in their own lives, and those I haven’t asked would probably give me the same answer. But that’s just how things appear, which might not be how they really are.

I’ve learned a lot from this whole experience. I learned what it’s like to have to go on government assistance. I’ve learned that people can do things for you and not have any compassion, and those who are compassionate aren’t always able to do what you need. I’ve learned that holding money makes you nothing more than a wallet to someone else, and you serve no purpose if you’re empty. I learned who to trust.

And I learned I’m not as humble as I feel, that I have too much pride that I need to swallow. No matter what, government assistance is a need for me at this point. I have to get over myself and just accept that fact, and my life will begin to get easier.

Well, a lot of things will make my life easier, At least now I know what I can handle, and it’s not a windfall.